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Soup from a Sausage-Peg was written by Hans Christian Andersen
(1805-1875), and was translated from the Danish by
M. R. James (1862-1936) as part of his
Hans Andersen Forty-Two Stories (1930).

Soup from a Sausage-Peg

by

Hans Christian Andersen

"That was a first-class dinner we had yesterday," said an old lady
Mouse to another, who had not been at the party. "I sat twenty-first
from the old Mouse King, and that's not so bad either. Let me tell you
the bill of fare, now; it was extremely well arranged. Mouldy bread,
bacon-rind, tallow candle and sausage, and then the same all over
again; just as good as having two dinners. The whole tone was
comfortable, and the talk as lively as at a family party. Nothing
whatever was left over but the sausage-pegs. So we talked about them,
and the old saying came up about 'making soup out of a sausage-peg'.
Everyone, of course, had heard of it, but nobody had ever tasted the
soup, let alone knowing how to make it. A very neat toast was
proposed—the health of the inventor—he deserved to be made President
of the Board of Guardians. Wasn't that clever? And then the old Mouse
King got up and promised that the young Mouse who should make the soup
most savoury should be his Queen, and a year and a day was allowed for
thinking it out."

"That wasn't bad either," said the second Mouse. "But how do you make
this soup?"

"Ah, how do you make it?" They were all asking that, all the lady
mice, young and old alike. Everyone would like well enough to become
Queen, but they didn't fancy the trouble of going out into the wide
world and learning the process; and, of course, that was necessary:
and then again it isn't given to everybody to leave their family and
the old chimney corner. You don't run across cheese-rind or smell
bacon-rind every day abroad; no, no, one may end by being starved, or
even perhaps eaten up alive by a cat."

It was considerations of that sort which deterred most of them from
setting out in search of knowledge, and only four mice presented
themselves for this expedition; they were young and lively, but poor.
They meant to go each of them to one of the four quarters of the
world, and it would depend on which of them fortune favoured. Each
took a sausage-peg with her to remind her of the object of the
journey; it would serve them for a pilgrim's staff. They set out early
in May, and early in May the next year they returned, but only three
of them. The fourth neither sent any message nor was any news of her
heard, and now was the day of decision.

"Somewhat of sorrow is ever mingled with one's brightest joys," said
the Mouse King. Nevertheless, he issued orders to invite all the mice
for many miles around to meet in the kitchen. The three travelled mice
stood in a row by themselves; for the fourth, who was missing, a
sausage-peg hung with black crape was set up. No one dared to give
their opinion before the three had spoken, and the Mouse King had said
whatever more was necessary.

Now we shall hear all about it.

II

What the first little Mouse had seen and learned on her travels

"When I set out into the wide world", said the first little Mouse, "I
thought, as many do at my time of life, that I had absorbed all the
wisdom of the world, but one has not done that. A year and a day must
pass before that happens. I went to sea at once: I went aboard a ship
that was to sail for the North. I had heard that at sea the cook must
understand how to get along, but it's easy enough to get along when
you have unlimited sides of bacon, tubs of salt meat and musty flour.
You live in luxury, but you learn nothing that will help to get soup
out of a sausage-peg. Many days and nights we sailed; we had pitching
and tossing, and we had wet. When we got to our destination I left the
vessel. It was far up in the North."

"It's a strange experience to leave one's own chimney corner at home
and go on board a ship where there is also some sort of a chimney
corner, and suddenly find yourself more than a hundred miles away in a
strange country. There were lonely forests of fir and birch; how
strong the scent of them was! I don't like it. The wild plants, too,
smelt so spicy that I sneezed and thought of sausage. There were great
woodland lakes, whose water was clear when you were near it, but seen
from a distance was as black as ink. On them floated white swans. I
took them for foam, they lay so still, but later I saw them fly and I
saw them walk, and then I knew them; they belong to the goose tribe,
you can see it by their gait; nobody can get away from his descent. I
kept to my own sort, and joined the wood and field mice, who by the
way know terribly little, especially about cookery, which, of course,
was what I was travelling abroad to look into. It was such an
extraordinary idea to them that anyone could imagine making soup from
a sausage-peg that it went at once through the whole forest; but that
this problem could be solved they reckoned an impossibility, and least
of all did I think that there on that very night I should be initiated
into the matter. It was midsummer, and that, they said, was why the
forest was so fragrant, the herbs so spicy, the lakes so clear and yet
so dark, with the white swans upon them. On the outskirts of the
forest, among three or four houses, a pole had been raised, tall as a
mainmast, and at the top of it hung a wreath and a ribbon; it was the
Maypole: girls and lads danced round it and sang, vying with the
fiddler's music. It went merrily on till near sunset, and in the
moonlight, but I didn't join them: what has a little Mouse to do at a
forest dance? No, I sat in the soft moss, holding my sausage-peg. The
moon was shining brightest on one spot where there was a tree covered
with moss so delicate—why, I could almost venture to say as delicate
as the fur of our Mouse King, but its colour was green, such that it
did one's eyes good to look at it. Thither all at once there came
marching up a number of the smartest little beings, no bigger than the
height of my knee. They looked like human beings, but they were better
proportioned. They called themselves Elves, and their clothes were of
flower petals set with the wings of flies and midges—really very
pretty. At first it seemed as if they were looking for something—I
didn't know what—and then a few of them came up to me, and the leader
of them pointed to my sausage-peg and said: 'That's just the sort of
thing we want. It's cut out for it, it's admirable!' and he became
more and more lost in admiration as he looked at my pilgrim staff.
'Lend, yes, but not keep,' I said. 'No, not keep,' they all said. They
took hold of the peg, which I let go, and danced off with it to the
plot of delicate moss, where they planted the peg right in the middle
of the green. They too wanted a Maypole, and the one they had now got
suited as well as if it had been cut out for the purpose. Next it was
dressed out. Ah, it was a sight, I can tell you!

"Tiny spiders spun gold thread about it, and hung up fluttering
scarves and flags of the finest weaving, and bleached to such snowy
whiteness in the moonshine that it dazzled my eyes. Then the Elves
took colours from butterfly wings and dropped them upon the white
threads, and flowers and diamonds shone out, so that I could no longer
recognize my sausage-peg. The like of such a Maypole as it made, I am
sure, was nowhere to be found. Then there came, first the noblest
company of the Elves, who were quite unclad. Nothing more delicate was
ever seen. I was invited to look on at the show, but from a distance,
since I was too big for them. Then the music struck up. It sounded as
if a thousand glass bells were ringing, full and strong. I thought it
must be the swans that were singing; I thought too that I could hear
the cuckoo and the thrush, and at last it seemed that the whole forest
was chiming in—voices of children, ringing of bells, song of birds,
the sweetest melodies: and all this loveliness was ringing out from
the Elves' Maypole. It was a whole peal of bells, and it came from my
sausage-peg. Never could I have believed that this could come out of
it, but that depends, of course, on whose hands it is in. Really, I
was so moved that I wept such tears as a little Mouse can shed, out of
pure delight.

"The night was all too short, but up there at that season it is but
brief. With the dawn there came a breath of air; the mirror of the
forest lake was ruffled, all the delicate waving scarves and banners
flew off into the air, the swaying arbours of cobweb, the suspension
bridges and balustrades, or whatever they were, that had been thrown
across from leaf to leaf vanished into nothing. Six Elves came and
brought me my sausage-peg, and asked if I had any wish that they could
grant me. So I begged them to tell me how one can make soup from a
sausage-peg.

"'How do we manage it?' said the leader, and he laughed. 'Why, you've
just seen! You hardly recognized your sausage-peg, did you?' 'Oh, you
mean in that way?' said I, and then told them straight out the object
of my travels, and what was expected from them by those at home. 'What
pleasure', said I, 'can the Mouse King and the whole realm derive from
my having seen all this beauty? I can't shake it out of my sausage-peg
and say: "Look, here's the peg, now the soup will come." That, to be
sure, would be a sort of dessert when people had eaten their fill.'
Then the Elf dipped his tiny finger into a blue violet, and said to
me: 'Attend now! I will anoint your staff, and when you get home to
the Mouse King's palace, do you touch with the staff your King's warm
breast. At once violets will blossom out all over the staff, even in
the depth of winter. There! You've got something to take home, and a
little more into the bargain.'" But before the little Mouse told what
this little more was, she pointed her staff towards the breast of the
King, and there did actually burst out the most delicious bouquet of
flowers, smelling so strong that the King ordered the mice who stood
nearest the fireplace to stick their tails into the fire so that one
could get a little scent of burning, for the smell of the violets was
too strong to be borne, and indeed was not generally liked.

"But what was the 'little more' that you spoke of?" asked the Mouse
King.

"Ah!" said the little Mouse. "That is what people call an effect." She
turned the sausage-peg round, and no flowers were to be seen. She now
held the bare peg, which she raised in the fashion of a conductor's
baton. "The violets are for sight, smell and touch (the Elf told me).
Something yet remains for hearing and for taste." She began beating
time, and music was heard, not such as rang out in the forest at the
Elves' festival; no, rather such as is heard in the kitchen. Upon my
word, there was a Cooking! All at once it came, as if the wind were
roaring down every chimney. Kettles and pots boiled over, the shovel
thundered against the copper—and then in an instant all was still,
you heard only the subdued song of the tea-kettle—a strange song, of
which you could not tell in the least whether it was the end or the
beginning that you heard. Then the little pot boiled and the big pot
boiled—one taking no notice of the other—it really seemed as if the
pots had no sense at all. The little Mouse brandished her baton more
and more wildly: the pots foamed, bubbled, boiled over, the wind
roared, the chimney screamed—whew! It was so alarming that the little
Mouse herself dropped her stick.

"A very odd soup!" said the Mouse King. "Will it not be served up
now?"

"That is all," said the little Mouse, and made a curtsey.

"That all? Very well, then, let us hear what the next one has to say,"
said the Mouse King.

III

What the second little Mouse had to tell

"I was born in the palace library," said the second Mouse. "Neither I
nor most of my family have ever known the privilege of getting into
the dining-room, let alone the larder; it was only on my travels and
here to-day that I have ever seen a kitchen. It is true that we often
suffered from hunger in the library, but we acquired a great deal of
information. The rumour reached us up there of the royal offer of a
prize for making soup out of a sausage-peg, whereupon my old
grandmother brought out a manuscript. She couldn't read it, but she
had heard it read, and in it was written: 'If one is a poet, one can
make soup out of a sausage-peg.' She asked me if I was a poet. I said
I was not, and she said that in that case I ought to go and take steps
to become one. I asked what the requirements were, for it was just as
difficult for me to discover as to make the soup. But Granny had heard
people read books, and she said that there were three principal things
necessary: 'Intelligence, Imagination, and Sensibility.' 'You go and
get these into you, and you will be a poet, and you will win through
safe enough with the sausage-peg.' So I set forth westward into the
wide world to become a poet.

"Intelligence, I knew, is, in every affair, the most important. The
other two qualities are not in such estimation; so I made for
intelligence in the first place; now where does it reside? 'Go to the
ant and become wise,' so said a great king in Jewry—I knew that from
the library, and I did not stop till I got to the nearest large
ant-hill and lay in wait, to become wise.

"They are very respectable folk, the ants; they are pure intelligence,
and with them everything is like a sum that is added up right. To work
and to lay eggs, they say, is to live in the present and provide for
the future, and that is what they do. They divide themselves into
clean and dirty ants; rank is denoted by a number. The Ant Queen is
number one, and her opinion is the only correct one, for she has
absorbed all wisdom, an important thing for me to know. She said a
great deal that was so clever that it appeared to me to have no sense.
She said that their ant hill was the highest thing in the world; yet
close by the hill stood a tree that was higher, much higher, the fact
couldn't be denied, so nobody mentioned it. One evening an ant had
lost its way in that direction and crawled up the trunk—not even
right up to the top, but yet higher than any ant had been before, and
when it turned back and got home, it spoke in the ant hill of
something much higher, that was outside. This seemed to the other ants
an insult to the whole community, so this ant was condemned to wear a
muzzle and remain in perpetual solitary confinement. But a short time
after another ant went to this tree and made the same exploration and
discovery and told of it too, as was said, with caution and vaguely;
and since it was also a respected ant and one of the clean, it was
believed; and when it died an egg-shell was set up as a monument to
it, for the ants honoured knowledge. I saw", said the little Mouse,
"how the ants continually ran about with their eggs on their backs.
One of them dropped hers, and had great difficulty in getting it up
again, in fact could not. Two others came and helped with all their
might, so that they were dropping their own eggs, whereupon they
instantly left off helping—for charity begins at home: and the Ant
Queen said of the incident, that it certainly showed feeling and
intelligence. 'These two things serve to place us ants at the head of
rational beings. Intelligence must and should outweigh all else, and
the greatest intelligence is mine.' With that she stood upon her hind
legs, and was so conspicuous I could not be mistaken; and I swallowed
her. 'Go to the ant and become wise.' I had got the Queen.

"I then approached the large tree I have mentioned: it was an oak,
very old, with a tall stem and mighty crown. I knew that in it dwelt a
living being, for a woman called a Dryad is born with the tree and
dies with it. I had heard about this in the library; now I saw such a
tree and such an oak-maid. She gave a dreadful shriek when she saw me
so close, for she was, like all women, very much afraid of mice.
Still, she had more reason to be so than others, for I could gnaw
through her tree, and on it her life depended. I talked to her in a
friendly and affectionate way, and she regained courage and took me on
her delicate hand, and when she heard why I had come out into the wide
world she promised that very likely that same evening I might get hold
of one of the two treasures I was still looking for. She told me that
Fantasus was a dear friend of hers, that he was as beautiful as the
God of Love, and that he very often came to rest himself under the
leafy branches of her tree, which then rustled above the two of them
with more life than ever. He would call her his own Dryad, and her
tree his own tree. Indeed, the beautiful stately gnarled oak was just
after his own heart, with its roots set deep and fast in the earth,
its trunk and crown rising high into the fresh air, and feeling the
driving keen-aired snow and the hot sun as they should be felt. 'Yes,'
she said, 'up there, the birds sing and tell of foreign lands, and on
that single dead bough the stork has built a nest, which is an
ornament to the tree, and one hears something about the land of the
pyramids. All this Fantasus enjoys, but he isn't satisfied with that;
I have to tell him myself about my life in the forest, ever since I
was little and my tree was so tiny that a nettle could hide it, up
till now, when it is so large and stately. Sit down now under the
woodruff and take good heed; when Fantasus comes I shall be sure to
find an opportunity to twitch his wing and pull a little feather out.
Take that: no poet ever had a better, and that will suffice you.'

"Fantasus came, the feather was pulled out, and I seized it," said the
little Mouse. "I kept it in water till it grew soft—it was still
extremely hard to digest, but I got through it. It's by no means easy
to eat yourself into a poet, such a quantity of stuff one has to
absorb. Well, now I had two things, Intelligence and Imagination, and
by their help I knew that the third thing was to be found in the
library; for a great man has said and has written that there are
novels whose only object is to relieve people of their superfluous
tears—they are in fact a sort of sponge, soaking up Sensibility. I
recollected some of these books, which had always looked to me very
appetizing: they had been so much read and were so greasy, they must
have soaked up an infinite quantity of force. So I returned to the
library and forthwith ate practically a whole novel, that is to say
the soft part, the real novel, for the rind, the binding, I left
alone. After digesting this and another, I could already perceive how
they were working within me. I then ate a small portion of a third,
and I was a poet. So at least I told myself and told others. I had
headache, stomach-ache—I don't know what aches I didn't have. Then I
pondered over the stories that might be brought into connection with a
sausage-peg, and my whole mind became full of pegs (the Ant Queen was
possessed of no common intelligence). I thought of the man who put a
white peg in his mouth and became invisible, and so did the peg. I
thought of old ale with a peg in the tankard, of the saying about
standing on a peg,[1]
putting a peg in,[2]
driving a peg into one's
coffin. All my thoughts ran on pegs: a poem could be written about
them if one were a poet, and a poet I am—I have worn myself out to
become one. I am ready every day in the week to serve Your Majesty
with a peg—a story. Very well, that is my soup."

"We will now hear the third," said the Mouse King.

There was a cry of "Pi, Pi!" at the kitchen door, and a little
Mouse—it was the fourth, the one they thought was dead—rushed in and
knocked down the sausage-peg with the black crape on it. She had been
running night and day, had travelled by rail in goods trains when she
got a chance, and yet had almost come too late. She thrust herself
forward, sadly out of breath; she had lost her sausage-peg, but not
her voice, and began speaking at once as if everyone was only waiting
for her and only wanted to hear her, and everything else in the world
was of no concern to anyone. She began talking at once, and talked
herself out. So unexpected was she that nobody had a moment to make
any remark about her or her speech all the time she was talking. Now
we must listen.

IV

What the fourth Mouse, who spoke before the third had spoken, had to
tell

"I went directly to the capital city," said she; "I don't remember the
name of it, I haven't a good memory for names. I went from the
railway along with some confiscated goods, to the law courts, and
there I took up with the jailer. He was talking about his prisoners,
and particularly about one of them, who had made rash speeches, about
which there had been endless talking and reading and writing. 'The
whole thing is soup from a sausage-peg,' said he, 'but that same soup
may easily cost him his knob.'

"This gave me an interest in the prisoner," said the little Mouse;
"and I watched for an opportunity and slipped into his cell—there's
always a hole for a mouse, even with locked doors. He looked very
pale; he had a great beard and big shining eyes. His lamp smoked, but
the walls were accustomed to it, it didn't make them any blacker. The
prisoner had scratched pictures and verses on them—white on
black—but I didn't read them. I think he found it very dull, and I
was a welcome visitor. He enticed me to him with breadcrumbs and
whistling, and gentle words, and was delighted with me. I trusted him,
and we became friends. He shared his bread and water with me, and gave
me cheese and sausage, so I lived in luxury; but it was more than
anything the pleasant companionship, I may say, that attracted me. He
let me run up his hand and arm right up his sleeve; let me creep into
his beard; called me his little friend. I got really fond of him; an
attachment like that is mutual. I forgot my mission in this wide
world, and left my sausage-peg in a crack in the floor—it's there
now. I decided to stay where I was, for if I went away, the poor
prisoner would have nothing at all left, and that really is too little
in the world. Well, I stayed, but he did not. On the last day he
talked to me very sorrowfully, and gave me twice as much bread and
cheese-rind as usual, and kissed his fingers to me. Then he went, and
never came back. I don't know his story. 'Soup from a sausage-peg,'
said the jailer, and to him I went, but I ought not to have trusted
him. He took me on his hand, to be sure, but it was to put me in a
cage, a treadmill. It's awful! You run and run and get no further, and
they only laugh at you.

"The jailer's grand-daughter was a pretty little thing with
golden-yellow curly hair and merry eyes and a laughing mouth. 'Poor
little mouse,' she said, peeping into my horrid cage. She pulled out
the iron pin, and I jumped down on the window-sill and out into the
gutter. Free! Free! That was all I thought of, not the object of my
journey. It was getting on for night when I took refuge in an old
tower. There lived a watchman and an owl; I trusted neither of them,
but the owl least. They're like cats, and they commit the grave error
of eating mice. Still, one can be mistaken, and I was mistaken: this
was a very respectable, extremely well educated old owl, who knew more
than the watchman and as much as myself. The young owls tried to make
a great to-do about everything, and she would say: 'Don't make soup
out of a sausage-peg.' It was the severest thing she could bring
herself to say, such was her affection for her family. I felt such
confidence in her that I called out 'Pip!' from the crack I was
sitting in. This trustfulness pleased her, and she assured me that I
should be under her protection, and no creature should be allowed to
hurt me; she meant to see about that herself, in winter when food got
scarce. She was clever in all ways; she informed me that the watchman
could not hoot without a horn, which hung on him, separate. He is
inordinately proud of it, and believes he is the owl in the tower.
Great cry and little wool! Soup from a sausage-peg! I begged her to
give me the recipe, and she explained it to me thus. 'Soup from a
sausage-peg is merely a human saying, and is understood in different
ways, and everyone thinks his own way is the most correct. But the
whole thing is, as a matter of fact, nothing at all.'

"'Nothing at all,' said I, and it struck me. 'Truth is not always
agreeable, but truth is above all else.' That also the owl said. I
thought it over, and perceived that if I brought you that which is
above all else, I should be bringing something far better than soup
from a sausage-peg."

"So I hurried off to get home in time, and bring that which is highest
and best, namely, the truth. The race of mice is an enlightened one,
and the King is at the head of them all. He is capable of making me
his queen, for the sake of the truth."

"Your truth is a lie," said the Mouse who, as yet, had had no chance
of speaking. "I can make the soup, and I shall now do so."

V

How the soup was made

"I have not travelled," said the third Mouse. "I stayed in my own
country, which is the right thing to do. Nobody need travel,
everything can be got just as good here. I stayed. I have not taken
lessons from supernatural beings, or eaten myself into knowledge, or
conversed with owls. What I have comes from my own meditations. Kindly
put the kettle on, full of water—to the brim—light the fire. Let it
burn till the water boils. It must boil over. Now throw in the peg.
Will the King be pleased to plunge his tail into the boiling water and
stir it round? The longer he stirs, the stronger will the soup become.
It costs nothing: there is no need for any flavouring—only stirring."

"Can no one else do this?" asked the Mouse King.

"No," said the Mouse; "the virtue resides in the King's tail alone."
The water boiled up, and the Mouse King took his place close by—it
was almost dangerous. He stuck out his tail, as mice do in a dairy
when they skim the cream off a pan and lick their tails afterwards.
But he only just stuck his tail into the hot steam and immediately
jumped down.

"Of course, you are my Queen," he said. "We will reserve the soup till
our golden wedding. My poorer subjects will then have something to
enjoy in prospect—in a long prospect."

So the wedding took place. But many of the mice, when they got home,
said: "It's all very well to call it soup from a sausage-peg, but
really it was soup from a mouse's tail." A point here and there in the
stories, they considered, was well made, but the whole might well have
been different. "Now I should have told it in this way. . . ."

That was criticism, and criticism is always very clever—afterwards.

The story went all over the world, and people's opinions on it were
divided, but the story itself remained. And this is the right result
in affairs great and small, even in soup from a sausage-peg. Only you
mustn't expect to be thanked for it.